Correspondences: A Family History in Letters | Selected shorter poems
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Edited by Andrew Motion

“Stevenson has produced a large body of work which is at once representative of common contemporary concerns and highly individual. She is a voice for our age and compellingly her own questing and questioning self.”—Andrew Motion

Overview

Table of Contents

Overview

In October 2007 The Poetry Foundation named Anne Stevenson the winner of the second Neglected Masters Award, designed to bring renewed critical attention to the work of an under-recognized, significant American poet. In conjunction with the award, The Library of America proudly presents this selection of poems by Stevenson, who has been described by Andrew Motion “as one of the most individual poetic voices to have emerged on either side of the Atlantic in the last fifty years.”

Stevenson’s is a poetry of astonishing range—formally, emotionally, and in the historical and geographic scope of what it addresses. Family and solitude, natural splendor and human craft, the vicissitudes of desire and grief are confronted with fierce directness and unfailing freshness, in modes ranging from songlike lyrics and formal elegies to the intergenerational complexities of her long verse narrative Correspondences, included here in its entirety.

Stevenson, who was also awarded the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation, was born in England to American parents, grew up in New England and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has spent most of her adult life in England.

This volume, the first American edition of her work in more than a generation, is edited by Andrew Motion, Professor Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College and England’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009.

Anne Stevenson reading two poems, “Poem for a Daughter” and “A Marriage.”

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Table of Contents

Selected Shorter Poems
Living in America
The Garden of Intellect
Still Life in Utah
Ann Arbor
Sierra Nevada
The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument
Poem for a Daughter
The Mother
Siskin
Generations
Coming Back to Cambridge
North Sea off Carnoustie
By the Boat House, Oxford
Ragwort
The Minister
Enough of Green
Path
Between
The Circle
The Sun Appears in November
Meniscus
The Price
If I Could Paint Essences
Small Philosophical Poem
Ah Babel
Swifts
Himalayan Balsam
The Fish Are All Sick
In the Tunnel of Summers
Waving to Elizabeth
After the Fall
Two Poems for Frances Horovitz
Red Rock Fault
Willow Song
Dreaming of the Dead
The Fiction Makers
Making Poetry
A Dream of Stones
Trinity at Low Tide
Salter’s Gate
Cold
Washing the Clocks
Politesse
Bloody Bloody
Black Hole
Lost
Journal Entry: Impromptu in C Minor
Letter to Sylvia Plath
The Other House
Elegy
When the camel is dust it goes through the needle’s eye
Where the Animals Go
As I Lay Sleeping
Saying the World
Vertigo
A Surprise on the First Day of School
Arioso Dolente
Moonrise
Skills
An Angel
Granny Scarecrow
Leaving
On Going Deaf
To witness pain is a different form of pain
Postscriptum
A Report from the Border
Haunted
Hearing with My Fingers
A Marriage
Washing My Hair
Who’s Joking with the Photographer?
To Phoebe
In the Weather of Deciduous Souls
Stone Milk
Before Eden
The Enigma
Orcop
Inheriting My Grandmother’s Nightmare
Beach Kites
Variations on a Line by Peter Redgrove